A Dive Into The Gene Pool

Both the Rotorua and Hamilton public
sessions were worthwhile - and entertaining.

Listening to
fears being expressed by those with sufficient courage to
face the Commissioners - notably the women folk - I began to
wonder if they were justified.

I was determined to get to
the bottom of the debate and get a ‘specialist’s’ view.
During the tea break I managed to corner one of the more
vociferous and bright-eyed young gene jockeys munching a
biscuit.

“John*,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to check
this stuff out.”

He looked threatened.

“Tell me, can we
really remove a gene from a toad, or whatever,
accurately?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied looking relieved. “We
use restrictor enzymes as our “scissors” to accurately cut
out the gene we require.”

Wait for it, I thought here it
comes.

“And then we simply slot it into the plant.”

“But
you can’t be sure of placing it accurately into a plant’s
DNA. Do we know what the effect will be, upstream or
downstream, from the insertion point?”

“No, but we can
test for that,” he quickly intoned.

They always make a
dash for this, their ‘emergency exit’. I continued, “But
you know even after breeding up several generations things
are still going wrong.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he quickly
responded.

“What about all that cotton that Monsanto
sold to the US farmers1? They must have tested that for
generations, but I’d heard all the bolls fell off. And what
about engineering yeast for the brewing industry? It made a
nasty poison instead.”2

John was getting visibly edgy.
“Look, there are risks doing almost everything in life,
driving a car for instance.” They seem to like this
analogy.

“Yes I appreciate that, but don’t you think it’s
dangerous to use all these nasty viruses?”

“No, of course
not,” he jumped quickly to the defence. “We always disarm
them. Think of the car example. We take the wheels
off.”

“Yes, I replied, “but I’ve never known a car find a
new set of wheels, bolt them back on, then career off down
the road of its own violation.” (Viruses can
recombine.)

“I have to go,” he said. “You just don’t
understand,” he threw over his shoulder as he scurried
through the door.

I left the meetings knowing one thing
for sure. Diving into the gene pool may be OK, but
there’s going to be no lifeguard.

*A pseudonym has
been used to protect the innocent.

(1) In Missouri, in
the first year of approval, almost 20,000 acres of the
glyphosate tolerant cotton malfunctioned. In some cases the
plants dropped their cotton bolls, in others the tolerance
genes were not properly expressed so that the GE plants were
killed by the herbicide.(2) They engineered yeast to
increase fermentation rates for the brewing industry it
produced toxic quantities of methyl
glyoxal.

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